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scottjl · 04-19-2010, 01:03 PM

well that's the first i've heard of any apple employee pushing it as an e-book reader. at least as a dedicated unit. everything else mentions that among other things you can read books on it.

for as much as i'd like to see a USB port on it (for a connection to various devices) it's unlikely we ever will. why? ok. so apple adds in a USB port, which one? a? b? mini? micro? is it a host or a device? for the sake of simplicity say it's a host with a type a, which would allow you to plug in printers, cameras, webcams, scanners, game controllers, keyboards, microphones, headsets, mp3 players, cd/dvd drives, jump drives, etc.

now what?

every one of those devices requires a driver written for it, and an API into the OS. who's going to write the drivers? who's going to maintain them? how are we going to load and manage them? it's not as simple as "add a socket for USB" and magically everything will work. there's a lot of back-end programming that will need to go on. who's going to do that? and more important to companies, who's going to pay for it?

next we'll have issues with drivers. distribution, installation, updating, removal of old drivers. need an OS interface to manage them (in settings i'm sure). add in a lot of complexity vs. the "just works" that the iphone/ipad now enjoys. i'm sure we'll see many devices that will never have drivers written for the iphone OS, just as there are many without Mac drivers (just look at how many $5 webcams are available in the PC world that don't work on the Mac). what about a badly written driver, it could crash the whole OS. ugh. there goes the iDevice's OS with frequent crashing. in my 3 years with an iphone i have never had the OS crash or lock up on me once. only applications bombing out or the springboard relaunching.

what about when apple updates the iDevice OS as they have done several times in the past few years. there have been some significant changes each time. you might need a new device driver for each version, or you might not.

i could keep going on, but i think the major points are made. i wouldn't be holding out for an iPad with usb ports any time soon, there just isn't enough benefit to apple (steve jobs) to justify to them (him) to put one in. the iPad can consume media content just fine over the existing port connector or wirelessly. adding a USB port would only cause headaches for apple and open up the iDevice platform for 3rd parties, which Apple doesn't care much about.

if you're looking for a tablet-style device with usb so you can connect anything to it definitely go with a device that is running an OS like windows.

04-19-2010, 01:03 PM	#6
scottjl Reader of Books Posts: 1,632 Karma: 2697 Join Date: Oct 2009 Device: none	well that's the first i've heard of any apple employee pushing it as an e-book reader. at least as a dedicated unit. everything else mentions that among other things you can read books on it. for as much as i'd like to see a USB port on it (for a connection to various devices) it's unlikely we ever will. why? ok. so apple adds in a USB port, which one? a? b? mini? micro? is it a host or a device? for the sake of simplicity say it's a host with a type a, which would allow you to plug in printers, cameras, webcams, scanners, game controllers, keyboards, microphones, headsets, mp3 players, cd/dvd drives, jump drives, etc. now what? every one of those devices requires a driver written for it, and an API into the OS. who's going to write the drivers? who's going to maintain them? how are we going to load and manage them? it's not as simple as "add a socket for USB" and magically everything will work. there's a lot of back-end programming that will need to go on. who's going to do that? and more important to companies, who's going to pay for it? next we'll have issues with drivers. distribution, installation, updating, removal of old drivers. need an OS interface to manage them (in settings i'm sure). add in a lot of complexity vs. the "just works" that the iphone/ipad now enjoys. i'm sure we'll see many devices that will never have drivers written for the iphone OS, just as there are many without Mac drivers (just look at how many $5 webcams are available in the PC world that don't work on the Mac). what about a badly written driver, it could crash the whole OS. ugh. there goes the iDevice's OS with frequent crashing. in my 3 years with an iphone i have never had the OS crash or lock up on me once. only applications bombing out or the springboard relaunching. what about when apple updates the iDevice OS as they have done several times in the past few years. there have been some significant changes each time. you might need a new device driver for each version, or you might not. i could keep going on, but i think the major points are made. i wouldn't be holding out for an iPad with usb ports any time soon, there just isn't enough benefit to apple (steve jobs) to justify to them (him) to put one in. the iPad can consume media content just fine over the existing port connector or wirelessly. adding a USB port would only cause headaches for apple and open up the iDevice platform for 3rd parties, which Apple doesn't care much about. if you're looking for a tablet-style device with usb so you can connect anything to it definitely go with a device that is running an OS like windows.